The folks at Freescale Semiconductor were kind enough to invite us to their offices yesterday in Taipei to show off the fact that they are actively working on Chrome OS for ARM processors.

I learned a lot during my time at Freescale, and I now better understand that it is taking a good deal of work to port Chromium over to the ARM architecture as opposed to x86. They had a version of Chromium running on their iMX515 processor that was from last year’s Google open source build.

I happened to have the latest spring release of Chromium on a USB drive in my bag while I was there. However, the build that I had was specifically for x86 and the reality is that a lot of work has to go into making Chromium compatible with ARM’s low power, mobile specific platform.

Here are some pictures that they allowed me to take, giving an indication that they are working closely with Google to ensure that Chrome OS will not just run on Intel processors. My time at the Freescale office in Taiwan yesterday gives me an indication that there will probably be ARM devices running Chrome OS in the first quarter of 2011.

More Chrome OS news will be coming in the closing days of Computex, keep checking our RSS feed or follow us on @thechromesource if you’re a Twitter addict like I am.

[...] a premium price to get access to early commercial Chrome OS hardware. But it’s going to be companies like Freescale Semiconductor, long a partner with Google on the Chrome project, that offer hardware designs that will enable the [...]